US special forces launched a high-stakes raid into Iran on Sunday to rescue an injured airman left stranded in a remote mountainous region after his aircraft was shot down two days earlier.
Details have emerged about how the US raced against the clock and advancing Iranian operatives to find the officer deep inside hostile territory.
The airman’s ordeal began on Friday when an F-15E Strike Eagle jet was shot down over southwestern Iran – the first incident of its kind in more than 20 years.
The two US military personnel on board ejected and, while the pilot was rescued the same day, the second crew member – a weapons operator – became separated and remained stranded in a sparsely populated, rugged region.
Official confirmation soon followed swirling reports that a US airman was missing inside a war zone.
While US aircraft were seen flying low over the area on Saturday, Iran offered a bounty of £50,000 ($66,100) to anyone who found him alive, and videos shared on social media, which have not been verified by the BBC, appeared to show armed civilians searching.
The airman was armed with a handgun, US officials said, and would have received training for this situation, which involves intermittently turning on a beacon signal to help American forces locate him, getting to high ground, establishing communications and concealing himself.
According to reports in US media, the airman hid in a mountain crevice and restricted the use of his beacon signal out of concern it could be picked up by Iran.
A senior Trump administration official said the CIA was able to trace the airman’s exact location and informed the Pentagon, which would have also had to rule out the possibility the beacon signal was an Iranian trap.
Donald Trump later said the injured airman’s location was monitored “24 hours a day” as he was “being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour”.
At a press conference on Monday, the president said ejected airman was injured badly, treated his own wounds and scaled cliffs while bleeding profusely to transmit his location.
The CIA also reportedly ran a deception campaign inside Iran, falsely spreading word that US forces had already found him.
As US special forces aboard several aircraft made their way towards the stranded officer, strikes were reportedly launched to keep Iranian troops away from the area.
The New York Times reported that the airman communicated information on Iranian positions from his hiding place high on a 7,000ft ridge to aid with those strikes.
CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner, reported that Navy SEALs – highly trained special operations troops – were then airdropped in to recover the airman.
The rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refuelling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more, Trump said.
“We were bringing them all over, and a lot of it was subterfuge, ” he said. “We wanted to have them think he was in a different location, because they had a vast military force out there – thousands of people were looking.”
But their departure was not straightforward.
Two C-130 transport planes tasked with retrieving rescue crews became bogged down in soil and were unable to take off from the remote base in Iran they had used to land, CBS reported.
US officials said they were destroyed to keep them out of enemy hands, standard practice for the military.
Footage and photos assessed BBC Verify appeared to show a smouldering aircraft wreckage in a mountainous area of central Iran, about 50km (30 miles) southeast of the city of Isfahan.
Iran’s military said two US C-130 military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed during the operation – and that “a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan…was completely foiled”, but US officials have denied they came under attack.
Iranian state media also said on Sunday that troops from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had shot down a US drone over Isfahan while it was searching for the missing airman.
BBC News has not been able to confirm either version of events.
US special forces left Iran on three extra aircraft sent to collect the crews, with one official telling CBS a rudimentary airfield in Iran was utilised for the operation.
The rescued airman landed in Kuwait for medical treatment.
Trump said he was “seriously wounded” but “will be just fine”.
Further details about the airman’s location, condition and identity have not been disclosed.
Just before 00:00 EDT (04:00 GMT) on Sunday, US media broke the news that the second pilot had been rescued.
An Israeli intelligence official told the Jerusalem Post that the IDF had assisted with the operation, including by launching strikes “designed to act as a diversion, drawing Iranian security forces away from the crash site and toward other areas”.
Iranian officials and state-run media have painted the operation as a failure, with Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for Iran’s main military command, saying several US military aircraft had been forced to make emergency landings.
He said: “The ignorant president, trapped in the swamp of the war and aggression that he himself started… fully realised that any aggression, ground operation, or infiltration… would face decisive and disgraceful defeat.”
Some US analysts have described the loss of an F-15E deep inside Iranian territory, followed by the destruction of several rescue aircraft, as showing the limitations of US air superiority.
Gen Frank McKenzie, a former commander of US Central Command, said “we did in fact lose a couple of aircraft in that mission” but he says you take that loss “any day” in a situation like this.
“It takes a year to build an aircraft – it takes 200 years to build a military tradition where you don’t leave anybody behind,” he told CBS’s Face The Nation programme.
